Interesting Engineering
Linear Labs, which started as a father-son project, claims to have reinvented the electric vehicle motor, and their Hunstable Electric Turbine promises three times the torque and twice the power of any other of its kind.

Industry Week
For this golden anniversary of IndustryWeek, we are taking a look back at 50 years of progress in manufacturing and sharing our vision of the progress yet to come.

The Block Chain Land
The technology behind the infamous cryptocurrency Bitcoin, blockchain, is becoming increasingly popular as cybersecurity experts look for more ways to fight cybercrime and data breach. Consumers are also becoming more and more proactive in terms of their cybersecurity, opening to alternatives that can promise better connectivity at heighted security.

Green Car Reports
Despite the growing number of electric cars in production, EVs are still new and different to most drivers. Ignorance of the technology has allowed various electric car myths to persist. Formula E- the all-electric racing series – put together this video busting five EV myths that just don’t seem to go away.

Riviera
Employing newly developed electrically assisted turbocharging, MTU solves turbo lag, improving engine agility and environmental performance.

Drone Life
A scene depicting dozens of autonomous drones shifting shape midflight isn’t from a trailer of the Transformers sequel. It’s a soon-to-be reality for the U.S. Army. Researchers with the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory and Texas A&M University recently presented findings from a two-year study at the AIAA Aviation Forum and Exposition’s virtual event.

New Equipment Digest
In the digital age, smart manufacturers understand the pivotal role technology can play. This is true whether it’s embracing robotics, 3D printing, 5G or IoT. After all, the ability to strategically leverage technology often surfaces as the crucial turning point for manufacturers working to establish a competitive advantage. However, regardless of what technology a manufacturer deploys, maximizing the investment can be a challenge.

Thomas Net
Thomas recently conducted a survey that indicates that although many companies have paused their apprenticeship programs, quite a number of them are still offering these programs. In fact, we found that more than half of the apprenticeship programs offered were not affected by the pandemic.

Detroit Free Press
The city of Sterling Heights – with support from Macomb County and the state of Michigan – is boldly raising its hand to be considered for the future home of the U.S. Space Command. It is the newest of 11 unified combatant commands in the Department of Defense and will help the military forces defend the nation’s interests in space.

Assembly Magazine
U.S. Army researchers have discovered a way to monitor the performance of 3D printed parts, which tend to have imperfections that affect performance in ways traditionally-machined parts do not. In the paper, “In-Situ Fatigue Monitoring Investigation of Additively Manufactured Maraging Steel, Army researchers verify that they can detect and monitor the wear and tear of 3D printed steel through sensor measurement. For the Army, these types of measurements help soldiers maintain readiness because these indicators help predict when parts will degrade or fail, and need replacement.

Automation World
Advances in vision systems offer packagers one of the biggest opportunities for improving productivity. Many packaging applications make use of 2D machine vision, where grayscale or color imaging creates a two-dimensional map that allows for easy detection of anomalies or variations in part contrast. As this type of vision increasingly becomes cheaper and faster, its use in packaging continues to grow, particularly in functions associated with inspection, barcode reading, surface marking detection, and basic positional verification. Now, with innovations in 3D vision, broader applications are becoming possible. Whereas with 2D applications, where objects being scanned must be on a flat surface and of a consistent size and shape, 3D vision gives insight into product depth and height and can therefore be used for random situations, where items are located haphazardly or stacked in a bin with varying orientation.

Power Transmission Engineering
The DMSC (Digital Metrology Standards Consortium) had their ANSI/DMSC QIF 3.0 metrology standard harvested, approved, and published by ISO as the new ISO standard ISO 23952:2020. DMSC is the developer and maintainer of QIF (Quality Information Framework), and other metrology standards. These standards are intended to help advance manufacturers reduce costs, offer a common format for product measurement results, and is a crucial enabler for digital transformation via MBE (Model Based Enterprise).

ThomasNet
The root cause of so many unfilled American jobs? Hint: It wasn’t the COVID-19 pandemic.
Manufacturing actually fared comparatively well to other industries, with many factories remaining open as essential businesses and some even hiring additional members to their staff to help meet PPE needs. In fact, in a recent survey that Thomas conducted, 91% of respondents said they think North American manufacturing will recover, and those that continued running their apprenticeship programs were not impacted by skilled labor shortages. 

Modern Machine Shop
The next generation of manufacturing employees have a solid work ethic and vast technical skills that provide value in the machine shop. 

MiBiz
New mandatory cybersecurity standards are poised to profoundly impact over 300,000 manufacturers across the United States, including in West Michigan, that make up the country’s defense industrial base (DIB) supply chain. On Jan. 31, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) released version 1.0 of what is called the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), which sets in place unified standards for cybersecurity that all members of the DIB must comply with in order to contract with the DoD.

CNBC
Much of the data produced by industrial companies remains unused, according to a senior executive at Swiss engineering firm ABB. Peter Terwiesch, president of ABB’s industrial automation said that “at least” 80% of data generated is not being utilized by companies. 

Manufacturing.net
(VIDEO) Orlando, Florida is soon to be the home of the United States’ first flying taxi regional hub, courtesy of German-based Lilium. Lilium, an aviation company focused on zero-emissions regional air mobility service announced November 11 that it is launching its first U.S. hub for the company’s all-electric, vertical take-off and landing jet aircraft, to be set in the Aerotropolis of Orlando innovation community Lake Nona.

AGMA Foundation press release
The eight scholarship recipients, including the Linda and Bipin Doshi Scholarship Winner, were selected from a record 29 applicants. Scholarships were granted in 2020 despite Covid related fundraising setbacks.